Website Hosting Services

There are many factors to consider when deciding what your hosting infrastructure needs are. In a lot of cases, 99.9% uptime over the course of a year is sufficient for your organization. However, on the other hand, organizations sometimes can lose millions of dollars’ worth of transactions for having an outage for a few minutes. Hosting is not just about uptime though, you also need to consider your traffic fluctuations, access regions, security needs, redundancies and at the root of it all you need to know what requirements your website and web applications need in order to function. To help with the process, we like to break things down into three primary categories: High Availability Servers, Dedicated Servers or Multi-tenant Servers.

Cloud or High Availability Servers

Some good examples here would be Amazon Web Services or Azure, where they have huge networks of compute power, database storage, content delivery and additional functionality to help with flexibility, scalability and reliability for your applications. The benefits of these systems include the ability to have as big or as little of an infrastructure as you need with the control to make that adjustment with a few clicks or even have adjustments controlled with automation. Usually if you are running cloud-based infrastructure, you have some specific business reasons or enough simultaneous traffic to warrant it.

Dedicated Hosting Servers

We prefer GoDaddy’s dedicated servers; however, dedicated servers are available from a multitude of providers. You could also have dedicated servers on premise that run your web applications, but unless you're used to having a server room and staff to manage it, we wouldn’t recommend this approach. Going to a dedicated server is helpful if you have predictable traffic patterns, but want additional control, security, reliability, performance, etc. Most larger organizations will be looking for this type of setup if they are not requesting the more modern approach of high availability. What’s nice about using a third party such as GoDaddy is that you can go with a self- or fully-managed dedicated server. This means if you go with the managed solution, you won’t need to have an infrastructure technician on staff to handle troubleshooting—you can leverage GoDaddy’s team of experts.

Shared Hosting Servers

This is the most common for smaller organizations or smaller traffic patterns. Not all shared hosting is created alike, again we favor GoDaddy in this situation for their reliability and ease of use. This doesn’t mean they are perfect because they are not, but when there are problems their 24/7 support is unparalleled in our experience. When relying on a shared hosting platform, it’s important to select the proper hosting plan so that you have the adequate performance necessary to run your applications. We find that the business class plans perform better and we also strongly disagree with the usage of a named plan such as “WordPress Hosting”. With shared hosting, you are renting a portion of the server. You want maximum control of the portion you are renting, not limitations similar to what you would find on a named plan. While you can’t control unplanned outages on a shared plan, we find that you still end up with 99.9% uptime (with GoDaddy), regardless of how inconvenient those unplanned outages are each month.

Our Recommendation

Your infrastructure will need to grow as your organization grows. It is best to consult with a professional on an ongoing basis to discover the best solutions based on your current needs and near future growth potential. You don’t want to overspend, nor do you want inadequate performance. At Web Tech Fusion, we can help discover your requirements, select and implement the best infrastructure solution, and manage your hosting needs over time.